MAKING DO

Growing up in the 1930's with a dad often laid off was a boyhood very shy of pocket money. Until my 16th birthday, the State Theater charged 4 cents for admission to a movie, and that was very often hard to get. I have already mentioned in these sketches that mama made dresses and that was the source of most of the "walking around" money for us boys. She also cut hair--- ours and most of the neighborhood boys. Ours was cut for free, of course, but they paid her a nickel each, if they had it. On Saturdays, when I had no money, which was almost every week, I scurried around looking for a friend who had a nickel and sometimes succeeded in getting one to come for a haircut. Mama would always stop what she was doing and cut the boy's hair, then she gave me the money. That meant I could go to the picture show and have a penny left over to spend. There were a lot of things you could buy with a penny.

There was almost a revolution when they reduced the age from 16 to 12 as the point at which a youth had to pay adult prices for movie tickets. It didn't happen until the beginning of WWII. The new fare schedule charged 5 cents for moviegoers under 12 and 15 cents for 12 and over.

One Saturday T. M. Hardy, my cousin, had a yard to mow for a dime and he offered me half to help him. Of course, I jumped at the chance. It was a large yard, and the mower we used was the push-type with roller blades. My job was to go ahead of the mower with a hoe and chop off the Johnson weeds; the mower wouldn't cut them. I had to remove any rocks or other impediments as well.

The big social event of the week for the young people was what we called the "midnight" movie at the State Theater on Saturday night at 10:30. Though its name was a little misleading, it ended after midnight. It was always well attended, especially by daters and other young folks; there was always a crowd waiting at the front of the theater for the movie preceding it to finish and dismiss the folks inside. Most of the ones coming out just turned around, bought new tickets, and went back in.

Theaters of the 1930's presented more than ads for coming attractions and a single movie. There was an occasional double feature, but in addition to the featured film, there was a chapter of an ongoing serial, a cartoon comedy, the Movietone News, and short documentaries. The serial ended every week with a disaster for the hero, like being shot, or run over by a train, or falling off a steep cliff. That left us all trying to figure how he was going to save himself at the beginning of next week's chapter, because we knew the sequel could not end until the last chapter. The disaster of the preceding week, however, was easily disposed of in a humdrum fashion, such as by rolling off the track before the train got to him.

In my family, the custom was to order a new suit of longjohns from Sears Roebuck for each boy in September, which we had to wear every day until the end of March. Saturdays they were removed for washing, and while in that process, we took our weekly bath in the same No. 10 washtub on the kitchen floor. We hovered around the big wood stove until our turn in the warm bath water. On cold wet days, mama hung a temporary clothes line above the stove and pinned the longjohns to it to dry. By bedtime on Saturday night we all went to bed in a clean suit of long handles. Mama had heated the irons she used for pressing shirts and put a couple, wrapped in flannel, under the quilts to warm our feet on. On bed held 3 boys, and the other in the room held 2.

Physical education classes had an innovation when I entered high school in 1939. Twice a week our class walked from the high school building a couple of blocks over to the National Guard armory, which doubled as our gymnasium. We went downstairs into the dressing room where each of us had an assigned locker in which we kept our t-shirts and shorts (or trunks) that we played basketball in or another type of activity. My problem was to change out of longjohns, and later, to put them back on, without being seen by the other boys. I solved it by crawling into the locker, pulling the door as nearly closed as I could, changing clothes in the dark. When the next September rolled around, we persuaded mama to order us boxer shorts and muscle undershirts. That was what the other boys wore.